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An Abstract Playground Designed to Fuel Kids' Creativity

Free Play makes playgrounds that look a lot like art sculptures. The Maze is made from swiss-cheese like cubes that can be configured into climbable structures.

The Weeping Willow is a monkey bar-like structure with ropes hanging down.

Cornstalks are installed into the ground and gently sway when touched. Free Play is working on illuminating them, too.

Children can crawl up the side of the Maze, or create their own secret playhouse inside the structure.

The Ant Farm is a series of tubes sandwiched between transparent plastic.

Children wiggle through the plastic maze.

A couple years ago Dan Schreibman, a father of two, took his daughters to a Richard Serra exhibition at the MoMA. The kids loved it. Regardless of whether Serra intended it, the artist's towering metal structures, with their sloping sides, strange textures and echoing sounds, turned out to be the perfect playground for Schreibman's children. “I had to pull them away, they love it so much,” he recalls.

This wasn't the first time Schreibman had noticed something like this happening. Though the management consultant had erected a perfectly fine play structure in his backyard, he found his daughters rarely used it. “They’d spend 30 minutes on the playground and then six hours playing at the pond,” he says. It got him thinking: What would it take to make a playground that children actually wanted to use? That led him to develop Free Play, a company focusing on creating a series of abstract play structures that will challenge children’s creativity during playtime.

Here's what all the pieces could look like arranged into a playscape.

Image: Free Play

Unstructured play–those increasingly rare moments when children run free, play make-believe, and build their creativity–has a critical role in a child’s intellectual, social and physical development. And yet, so many of the playgrounds we see leave little room for imagination. We live in a litigious, better-safe-than-sorry world, and our sterilized, standardized playgrounds tend to reflect that.

Schreibman’s playground doesn’t look a bit like the hulking plastic structures at your neighborhood park. There are no slides, sandboxes or forts to force-feed entertainment. In their place are structures that look more like art than playground. Schreibman hired LTL Architects to design four pieces of equipment, and gave them one main directive: Free Play structures needed to be unstructured. “If you let a child develop that love of learning and exploration, it will last them a lifetime,” says Schreibman.

Each piece can be used individually or grouped together to create a sprawling, abstract playground. There’s the Cornstalks, 6.5-foot tubes that are installed directly into the ground and gently sway as they are touched. If you’ve ever played in a cornfield as a child, you know cornstalks aren’t just stalks; they’re hideouts, temporary homes, lanes for a race through a muddy field. LTL wanted to recreate that sense of dexterity by creating dense clusters of cornstalks that might lead to a clearing in the middle.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the Maze, a set of endlessly configurable cubes that you can stack however you choose. Children can crawl on it like a climbing wall or hang out inside as though it’s their own secret playhouse. There’s also the Ant Farm, a strange-looking jumble of red tubes surrounded by transparent polycarbonate that children are encouraged to wiggle through. “This one is meant to be very physically challenging,” Schreibman says.

The Weeping Willow's ropes are replaced with chimes. Image: Free Play

Lastly, there's the Weeping Willow, a pretty metal structure about 10-feet high that has bright yellow ropes dangling down from chains. Children can walk through them, swing from them, tie them into braids and knots. The pieces are modular and customizable (they run $30,000-$50,000), so they’ll fit in just about any situation, says Schreibman.

The first set of Free Play structures will be installed at a new FIFA stadium in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, but Schreibman says he hopes to begin rolling these out to more locations later this year. He envisions them in settings like zoos or museums, though Schreibman himself has a Weeping Willow set up in his backyard and says it’s been a source of endless fascination for his children. “The pond is still very popular,” he says. “But the kids are really drawn to these pieces.”